Tony At 10: RUSH TO JUDGEMENT; BLOG # 183; MAY 15, 2015

THE MESSAGE:

FOR EACH STORY, THERE IS ALWAYS ANOTHER SIDE

Some people 'shoot from the hip'. Some 'waffle back and forth'. Some like to 'think on it a bit". Others 'rush to judgement'. Still others 'know it all' or 'don't want to talk about it'. There are also those whose mouth always wins in the race with their brain. Politicians lie; missionaries preach; lovers pitch woo; egoists hype themselves; reformers protest; teachers instruct; actors portray with conviction; lawyers argue; dogs bark; philosophers debate; salesmen sell; authors tell; artists present; judges deliver; Canadian senators......?????

THE FRED GRAY CASE IN BALTIMORE

The protest has begun! Blacks are rioting, calling "racism". Hooligans are committing arson and theft. 6 Policemen have been charged. The black prosecutor has labelled the case a homicide. Is this Ferguson Missouri all over again? Are people really racist? Obviously some are; however, could it be that many people just don't like the way blacks behave? Do the rioters and looters actually perform a disservice to their plight.

Are mistrust of authority, gangs, guns, drugs and crime the rule in many black communities?

LOOK FAMILIAR?

Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke (D) appeared on Fox News and declared the charges brought against six police officers in the death of Freddie Gray are unfounded and surely premature. “These cops are political prisoners; offered up as human sacrifices and thrown like red meat to an angry mob.”

Clarke said of the charges, “it’s a miscarriage of justice. This neophyte prosecutor stood up there and made a political statement. I say that because she’s voicing some of the chants from an angry mob. She said, I hear the voices. She’s not supposed to hear anything as she reviews this case that is not consistent with the rule of law and our system of justice. There is no way I have ever gotten a criminal charge within 24 hours as she did. A prosecutor who is thorough needs several days to sift through hundreds of pages of reports. They usually want to interview some of the witnesses themselves, in person, and they have to sift through all of the evidence, piece by piece, and they have to wait for some of the forensics evidence to conclude, to come back and that’s why I say on a minimum, three to four days. She just got this case yesterday.

Marilyn Mosby, the freshly elected
35-year-old state lawyer

This is political activism. She’ll never prove this beyond a reasonable doubt, and I’m not going to silently stand by and watch my brother officers, offered up as human sacrifices, thrown like red meat to an angry mob, just to appease this angry mob.” And that “she rushed this thing through.”

Her statement in this week's original clip was removed by some unknown culprit. I would surmise that she was remorseful about some part of it and had it removed but I do not know for sure. I replaced it with two other clips

THE DUKE UNIVERSITY LACROSSE TEAM SCANDAL

In March 2006, two strippers were hired by members of the university’s lacrosse team to perform at the private home of two team captains. Crystal Mangum, arrived, intoxicated, with a fellow stripper. She became involved in an argument with the occupants of the house, and left They complaining about racial insults shouted at them by the predominantly white partygoers.

Mangum filed a complaint that she had been forcibly detained, raped, sodomized and strangled by a group of men in the house’s bathroom.

William D. Cohan’s The Price of Silence is an account of what happened up to and after Mangum made her accusation.

Many people at Duke and in the surrounding community of Durham, N.C., were very eager to believe the worst of the lacrosse players. Not only did they get away with repeated incidents of drunk and disorderly behaviour. They were perceived to dominate the university’s social life in a virtual sex zoo.

Cohan, in The Price of Silence, reveals that the true drivers of the scandal were an overzealous Durham police officer, Mark Gottlieb, who carried on an alleged crusade against Duke students in Trinity Park a Durham neighbourhood, and the misconduct of Durham’s district attorney, Mike Nifong.

As a white male, Nifong faced a tricky primary reelection campaign against two Democratic rivals, a black man and a white woman. Nifong made countless appearances before the press, relaying Mangum’s tale of lurid and hateful abuse at the hands of young athletes who already had a reputation around town for unruly frat parties. He claimed that undisclosed DNA evidence supported her accusations even after he knew that it did not. Eventually it would come out that, among other irregularities, Mangum identified the three men who were eventually indicted from tainted photo lineups, that Nifong refused to see evidence that at least two of the men had documented alibis for the time of the alleged attack and that he’d withheld potentially exculpatory evidence from the defense. In 2007, Nifong’s license to practice law was revoked by the North Carolina State Bar Disciplinary Committee.

The Duke administration offered only feeble support offered to the falsely accused lacrosse players. The lacrosse coach was fired. Newspapers, some faculty members and Nancy Grace jumped on the band wagon created by Nifong’s highly irregular, misleading and unethical public statements, made at a time when he had access to information that no outsider possessed.

“When I think back through the whole complex history of this episode,” said Richard Brodhead, the president of Duke University to a gathering organized by that university’s law school in 2007, “the scariest thing to me is that actual human lives were at the mercy of so much instant moral certainty, before the facts had been established. If there’s one lesson the world should take from the Duke lacrosse case, it’s the danger of prejudgment and our need to defend against it at every turn.”

ANOTHER WHITE AND BLACK

A Madison, Wis., police officer who killed an unarmed black man in March, in one of a spate of similar incidents that have set off protests around the country, will not face criminal charges, a prosecutor said Tuesday.

Officer Matt Kenny

The shooting of Anthony Robinson Jr. has led to protests in Madison and raised concerns of potential unrest if the officer, Matt Kenny, who is white, was not charged.

Dane County district attorney, Ismael Ozanne, repeatedly stressed that on the day he died, March 6, Mr. Robinson was behaving erratically and violently, assaulting several people — apparently including Officer Kenny.

The Dane County district

attorney, Ismael Ozanne,

“My decision will not bring Tony Robinson Jr. back,” he said. “My decision will not end the racial disparities that exist in the justice system, in our justice system. My decision is not based on emotion. Rather, this decision is based on the facts as they have been reported to me.”